


The Soul's Retaken Moments

by Doc_VUX



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Body Horror, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mental Health Issues, Psychological Horror, Self-Harm, Surrealism, prose poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 07:58:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13783173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doc_VUX/pseuds/Doc_VUX
Summary: The second time I meantTo last it out and not come back at all.I rocked shutAs a seashell.They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.-Sylvia Path's "Lady Lazarus"





	The Soul's Retaken Moments

**I.**  


The moment you laid eyes on him, you felt something take root, seedlings pressing their tender shoots upward, forcing their way up your throat like bile. All your words were spoken with a rose-tinted sweetness, a perfume masking the scent of lies in your words, the scent of double-meanings. And the thorns dug their way into your throat, wound their thorned stalks around your heart, your lungs, and yet you smiled at that human as if he was the lovely moon on a clear Cardassian night.

**II.**  


They accused you of having eyes everywhere. Sometimes, if you peer deep into the mirror, you can catch them, electric-blue irises twitching between your scales, pupils dilating and contracting, watching you as much as you watch them. Sometimes, you take the pins (outdated, people might say but you way they're perfect for the uses you put them to) and stab out each eye until you feel safe.  


You take the pins, clean them of your own blood, and feel truly alone and unwatched again.

**III.**  


The fear of failure secures the hands wrapped around your throat. You can pretend that sleep deprivation will loosen the knot of fingers, just watching to crush your windpipe at the slightest hint of imperfection. Nothing you do makes them leave and sometimes you mask asphyxiation with smiles and pleasant conversation. In the mirror, you see His hands around your throat and you spend a long time clawing at them, only to realize you've clawed at your own scales, at a ghost in a reflection.  


You take the dermal regenerator in hand and in silence.

**IV.**  


Some nights you dream of home. Warm and safe, Mila chiding you for oversleeping. It's like you can simply redo things and do them better. It leaves a lightness in your chest, but a hollowness when you wake up.  


Some nights you dream of Him and the heavy hand of disappointment on your back, leading you back to you shackles, locking you in the dark. You always awake tangled in your blanket, as if you'd been wrestling something unseen and it takes effort to draw breath without screaming.

**V.**  


You are what you eat and everything you've eaten has been Bajoran for years. The worst nightmare is one in which your scales retreat back into your body, like plants during times of drought, retreating under your skin. Your nose develops ridges of the people you've watched suffer and now the cycle of suffering and oppression comes full circle. Not even the Bajoran gods would want you.  


Mornings, you run hands over your scales, painfully against the grain of them, ensuring they're still there and ensuring you're still you.  


Maybe you just need to eat more Cardassian.

**VI.**  


The venom you need is easy to get with enough latinum and enough vagueness. You water it down, mix it with wine, take it like something holy but not on your knees. It doesn't kill you, not since you've taken the precaution of making it such a weak concoction (still you can hear the human and your old friend both scolding you for being so brash, thinking you can tempt death and escape it in the same breath). Everything is a hundred times brighter, a brightness you haven't seen since the implant gave out. Everything feels fine and perfect for once until you wake up the next morning and vomit for hours. 

**VII.**  


Your hands are covered in blood. You flex your fingers, ball your hands into fists and you realize the blood is not your own. It dries tacky on your hands, flaking and crumbling like you. When you reach for your tailoring tools, you grasp a pair of pliers. The swatches you've been toying with are gone, replaced with a shallow dish of teeth, blood pooled at the bottom. You remember this instance and it is so out of place on the station. But this is not the station even though you're sure you are you.  


You look at the teeth in the dish, able to identify each person they came from. Your own are there too but they are also in your mouth.

 **VIII.**  


On your knees, you accept death. The hands that hold the executioner's axe are His but the face that looks down at you is your own, hidden behind a mesh screen, strapped tight to your skull. You watch you, watch the axe gripped in His hands. There is nothing said between you and you, or the Not-You that stares down at You. The axe is raised with the hands that gripped you with a painful disappointment.  


When it comes down, metal against your throat, you feel nothing and you wake up feeling just as much nothing.

**IX.**  


He talks about love poems but all you can see is rot. Fungus sprouting, the hardiest and holiest of any natural life, taking hold with moss. Everything is overrun with low-lives like moss and mycelium and sometimes they look so soft, as if you could take them into your mouth, chew gently, and wake up somewhere else.  


The insects are another matter. You can see beetles moving under his skin, their larvae eating at his muscles, his fat, his bones. You catch them behind his teeth and you've have a mind to reach over and pull the iridescent insects from inside his mouth, collect their shells like a hatchling would.  


Instead you nod politely.

**X.**  


From the shade, you watch a snake sliding across the sand. Picking up a small hand-shovel from your useless fight against the encroaching desert, you raise it to the sun, bring it down. The snake's mouth opens and closes as if it is drowning, its eyes open and reflecting you darkly. It's edible, if you had half an appetite and half a mind to eat.  


But instead you draw yourself into yourself, balling up as if you've gone back to your egg, and wondering what separates you from this low, slithering serpent.

**XI.**  


You dig corpses from the rubble and finding the dead is easier than bringing the living back into the world. Once you find a father and son, both dead, the father twisted and contorted, his body holding up the rubble around his son, who was charred so badly he might not have survived to see the sacrifice,, made in a hasty decision of love and duty.  


But it touches you so badly you have to excuse yourself, laughing and crying in equal measure late into the night and early on into dawn.

**XII.**  


You are not alone in the palace they present you with. You have a warm and physical body to share a bed with, a pet you keep alive in your basement out of vanity and blind hope. But there is a third, unwelcome guest. He comes and goes, disappearing around corners or lurking just your of sight. Sometimes He gets bold enough to assault you: hands around your throat ("It's just another panic attack, Elim") or by assaulting you at night ("Self-inflicted, Elim. It's nothing, really.") and you never know how to or who to trust.  


Sometimes He tells you He will never leave and you believe it.


End file.
